By Sean Carey

After an outbreak of chikungunya, a mosquito-borne virus which affected 270,000 people on the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion in 2005-2006, scientists at L’Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) in Marseille have been working hard to come up with a solution so that no one in France’s overseas departments (DOM), or anywhere else, has to experience high fever, headache, rash, and severe joint and muscle pain. These symptoms, although rarely fatal, can last between a few days and several months.

About time too some would say. Indeed, two academic commentators have accused the public health authorities as well as the media in metropolitan France of being far too slow to react to the initial crisis on an island, which lies nearly 6000 of miles south-east of Paris. In two papers on the chikungunya epidemic in La Réunion, one in 2008 and another in 2009,  University of South Australia’s  Philip Weinstein and Srilata Ravi claim that the delay in acknowledging the public health risk of the virus reflected “passive denial” by the French metropolitan government, convinced that its mainland European citizens were in no danger, a view which was mirrored in the “residual colonial thinking on the priority placed on reporting on an epidemic in the remote tropical location” by the mainstream media. Continue reading “La Réunion leads the way in tackling the chikungunya virus” →